Paul Duszek

The waiter's feet ache first, before anything else — flat on non-slip rubber, a double shift already logged in them, and you feel it in the body you're about to leave the way you'd feel a bill you're tired of paying. Miami light through the window of your condo is doing that hard late-morning thing where it turns everything white. You picked this body 578 spins ago, or however many ago it actually was — you've stopped keeping precise count, though the site keeps it for you — and you liked him fine for a while: big, gray-haired, easy with strangers, a body that could carry trays through a packed dining room like it weighed nothing. But three tables sat down twenty minutes ago and none of them have looked at a menu, and your knees are the ones absorbing that, and there is a specific, low, familiar itch starting up under your sternum that has nothing to do with tables. You know the itch. It means you are already gone, in every way but the one that counts. You open the site on your phone in the server station, thumb hovering, and you do not let yourself think about why, exactly, today — only that the itch has never once been talked out of itself. You spin.

Rain. Cold rain, real cold, the kind Miami doesn't have a word for anymore. You are standing under a bus shelter with your hood shoved back and your face turned up into the runoff coming off the roof edge, water running into your collar, and you are not flinching from it. There's a board above you reading 3 MIN in orange dashes. Your body — his body — is thin under a wet black jacket, and the first thing you register, before thought, is how little of you there is: no cushion of gut against the jacket zipper, a spine you can feel through your own shirt when you square your shoulders. Cold gets to this body fast. It hasn't gotten to it yet. You're standing in the rain like a man who has gone a long time without feeling anything at all, and some part of him that is now the smallest, faintest part of you was doing that on purpose.

The jacket is the first thing that talks. Wet nylon under your palms, and a flash comes up out of nowhere: a hook by a door, a storm door with a torn screen, this exact jacket taken down off it forty minutes ago while somebody upstairs ran water for a shower. Paul. The name arrives with the jacket, the way his own name always does, second-hand, like being introduced to yourself. Paul Duszek, and under the jacket a blue oxford shirt, and the shirt gives you the morning whole: sleeves rolled by his own hands, cuffs turned twice each, unthinking, muscle memory older than the marriage. The wedding band is next — cold metal against a colder finger — and it brings the wife with it, whole and sudden: her voice from the kitchen this morning, not unkind, asking if he'd taken his metformin, and him saying yes around a mouthful of toast, and the small guilty truth that he hadn't yet, that the pill bottle is still on the bathroom counter with its childproof cap half off. Diabetes lives in this body like weather — a low hum of thirst, a tiredness in the eyes that isn't about sleep.

The tattoo on your forearm is warm compared to the rain, skin-warm under skin-cold, and it opens wider than the rest: nineteen years old, a boardwalk shop, an anchor because his uncle had one and his uncle had stories, bold lines that were sharp then and have gone soft and blue-gray now the way old ink does on old skin. Forty years of Tuesdays since. You feel, distantly and completely, how much of this man's life happened at the front of a room — chalk dust that isn't chalk dust anymore, whiteboard marker smell, the particular fatigue of talking to teenagers for six hours and then standing in an empty classroom afterward doing the thing he actually likes best, which is the quiet after, grading with the door open so nobody thinks he's hiding.

There's a daughter in there too — the shirt again, a memory riding shotgun on the first one, her at maybe eight, gripping this same rolled cuff at a school function, and the ex-girlfriend arrives unbidden and separate from that, more recent, sharper-edged, a woman he is embarrassed to still think about as often as he does, three years divorced-in-spirit from something that never had a divorce because it was never a marriage, just a mistake he was careful and unhappy about for two years running. His wife doesn't know how recent. You know now because his hands know, because the phone in his jacket pocket — you feel its shape against your hip — still has her number in it, unlabeled, and his thumb has hovered over it more than he'd ever say out loud.

The rain keeps coming down. His hands, when you're not paying attention to them, are already doing the thing they do — two fingers drumming once, twice, against his crossed forearms, a rhythm with no song attached, just motion for its own sake, forty years of nervous energy with nowhere else to go. Bad knees, decent shoulders, a back that complains on the stairs at school and nowhere else. This body knows how to hold chalk, how to hold a coffee mug just so, how to sign a report card in a hurry. It does not know how to be looked at by teenagers as anything other than furniture, and there is a whole small grief folded into that, filed away, mostly made peace with.

You look down at your hands — thin, freckled up the backs same as the face, a plain gold band catching gray light, water running off the knuckles in a way that this body would usually shiver at and doesn't, not with you standing in it.

"Guess I'm not waiting for that bus," you say, out loud, to no one, and your voice comes out lighter than the waiter's ever did, and the board over your head clicks down to 2 MIN, and somewhere behind you a car goes through standing water and doesn't slow down.